War On Religion Or Theocracy

http://thecollegeconservative.com/2012/02/13/war-on-religion/

http://news.yahoo.com/santorum-says-obama-agenda-not-based-bible-011457960.html

http://www.politicususa.com/en/numbers-do-not-lie-christofascisms-values-are-not-americas

http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Elephant-In-The-Room--by-Daniel-Vojir-090226-961.html

Republican politicians have been notorious for their theocratic tendencies since at least the 90s with George W. Bush, though it might go further back to his father who allegedly said atheists should not be considered citizens. Their infamy lies in a coalition they have formed with preachers to implicitly or explicitly support certain candidates as Godly and Biblical leaders who will not disappoint America. While there’s already an issue of churches getting involved in politics on the grounds that they could lose their tax exempt status, what’s more troubling is how much this rhetoric has permeated the Republican Party. Virtually none of the candidates, even Ron Paul, can or will separate themselves willingly from their faith, especially in terms of legislation they support and also in drawing supporters. Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, both strong Catholics, make it a practice to affirm they are motivated by their Catholicism to be politically active and reform America to be a better place. I wonder how good of a place it would be if they were in charge and started doing things that are ironically against the Constitution they hold in fairly high regard when it’s convenient for them. Santorum is reported to have said that if he were elected President, he would overturn Roe v. Wade. Unfortunately, there’s no precedent or permission in the Constitution for the President to do that. Both Gingrich and Santorum also decry Obama and his supposed “war on religion”, Christianity in particular being the target they whine about with such things as the recent birth control mandate and likely going as far back as Obama’s declaration that America “is not a Christian nation,” Romney and Paul also speak fairly frankly about their faith, though both of them are more reticent, either because their faith is not considered mainstream enough in the case of the lone Mormon candidate or they feel that their faith is not pertinent to their legislation when adherence to the Constitution will suffice.

There is no war on Christianity, only on what might be called Christofascism, a general idea that Christians get from politicians such as Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, that Christians in America are persecuted and should force themselves upon American culture, excluding non Christian and non-traditional groups, such as atheists, homosexuals and other minorities still treated badly for being different without harming people in any concrete sense, such as American Muslims. The idea of basing your politics on the teachings of a person that was fairly non political in his overall goals is counterproductive and ironic in that conservatives tout themselves as following what God tells them to do in the political field.  Jesus advocated a sort of separation between church and state, at least in terms of what you donated, though he also spoke of his kingdom not being of this earth. Therefore, any real attempts to bring forth Jesus to earth is, again, highly likely to backfire on you or miss the point.

If there is a war on Christofascism, then there are other associated ideas that are also in conflict with the ideals of a religiously diverse, yet impartial and secular, democratic republic. These include Dominionism, theocracy, theonomy and practices resultant from it. Some of the big ones include school sponsored prayer, placing the Ten Commandments in the context of law as only religiously based, as Roy Moore did in Alabama, and trying to restrict the notions of family and marriage to only those founded under particular faiths, especially monotheistic ones. People say prayer was entirely removed from the schools, but it wasn’t. When the school endorses religion or irreligion in their actions, it is not right, but students and teachers can pray as individuals, since they are not infringing on others’ rights by doing so, with some rare exceptions. They say the Ten Commandments are being systematically erased from federal buildings, and they technically aren’t, since there are Supreme Court cases where they ruled a display of the Ten Commandments alongside other examples of historical jurisprudence were constitutional. And I seriously doubt that many modern reasonable Christians would take you seriously at the claim that gay families are somehow destructive. The normalization of gay people being good parents and also able to have committed marriages is not going to lead to normalizing marriages between people and animals or the like.

Conflicts of church and state, religion and government, are important in that they are concerned with a right that we all seem to take for granted. Misinterpretation abounds as to the extent to which an individual has freedom of religion, which has not been the understanding of the Supreme Court and wasn’t likely what the founding fathers intended either. Church has a boundary it is expected to not cross in practicing religion, which includes entanglement with the government as well as not breaking any civil laws. Regardless of whether an individual believes those civil and secular laws are binding upon them as an adherent to a faith that believes something contrary to that is irrelevant in that the person is still breaking the law in practicing something such as polygamy. While I think making it illegal is harsh, the law stands as it is. More relevant examples might be human sacrifice as part of a religion’s practices. This would not be protected and this is just one instance of many where religious freedom is inhibited for the compelling interest of the state, to preserve life, liberty and property of other citizens. The government is not trying to tell the churches who they should marry in making a constitutional amendment that determines that secular and civil marriage is not just between a man and a woman or declaring certain discriminatory practices unconstitutional and therefore illegal even on individual state level. The church is free to discriminate in terms of sanctifying any marriage or refusing to serve people in their house of worship, as it is their right being an organization that is privately funded, unless otherwise demonstrated. It would not be infringing upon religious exercise to prohibit direct church participation in politics, since it’s not a stretch to claim the church itself believes it shouldn’t become involved in the politics of the “sinful” world. If we don’t understand the limits of the church in relation to the government, then we risk overstepping the boundaries that exist both by observation and reason. Impartiality to religion by the federal government is not favoring atheism, it is being fair to everyone of faith or no faith.

As someone who studies religion, but nonetheless doesn’t believe in it as truth, I have an obligation to defend religious freedom even with those I disagree with strongly. Protecting the rights of others leads in turn to protecting your own, at least by association of common courtesy. Kill them with kindness, as the saying goes. If theists think I’m an evil or amoral person, I’ll demonstrate otherwise by showing compassion in their suffering discrimination, for instance. Disagreement should be put aside in terms of following and upholding the law. Even such reprehensible people as Westboro Baptist Church should be protected in terms of reasonable exercise of their religious beliefs. Of course there are limits, but sometimes the limits can border on censorship, which is contradictory even to principles of secularism. If we are to truly have a free market of ideas and people using their reason to come to conclusions about the world, then we can’t suppress beliefs that are disagreeable in that they are, by rational consideration, patently ridiculous. The more we let them demonstrate how foolish their beliefs are by comparison will at least suppress the fanaticism and theocratic ideas that they represent.  Religion may never disappear in its influence on people’s legislative decisions, but we should strive to educate others as to finding comparable and compelling secular arguments for their cause. Religion should not be the motivating factor for voters to consider in terms of candidates, but their positions, as I said in “Mormon Candidate Discrimination” Morality is one thing, but justice shouldn’t require religion to motivate someone to stand for a cause in spite of differences. Politics and religion are inevitably connected at the border that exists with our moral considerations derived many times from religion and applied to secular contexts. But they should never become entangled excessively or it creates a place where either the government dictates religious practice or religious practice and communities dictate government and law. Neither of those should come to be in the future, if we can prevent them. Until next time, Namaste and aloha

WDAD: What Do Atheists Do About Church/State Separation?

http://www.atheists.org/Separation_of_Church_and_State,_A_Rebuttal

http://atheism.about.com/od/churchstatemyths/a/phrase.htm

http://atheism.about.com/od/hostilitytoreligion/a/PromoteAtheism.htm

http://viridia.org/2007/04/01/atheism-and-separation-of-church-and-state/

Atheists are commonly, but not solely, at the forefront of issues of church/state separation and the legality of school sponsored prayer or endorsement of a particular religion. But, many religious people object; why do atheists care so much about the presence of something they don’t believe in? Shouldn’t they just let the religious believe as they will and allow the presence of what they claim is a civil religion shared by America? First off, just because someone doesn’t believe in something doesn’t mean they can’t have an interest in its public existence. Religious studies does not preclude being a nonbeliever in all religious creeds and, one might argue, actually aids one in being more reasonable towards whether they hold so called “absolute” truth in them. But the second issue lies with this sanctimonious idea that religious people of a majority faith can have some established tradition of a school prayer, such as in Cranston, Rhode Island, without consideration of any other groups, believers or otherwise. Not to mention civil religion is another issue entirely of something becoming secularized by long historical exposure, which I’d strongly disagree with and might confront another time. Even Jesus himself says that praying in public and making a big show of your piety is hypocritical and doesn’t show proper reverence to a God you come to as an individual, in privacy. No one’s saying that religious people can’t pray to themselves or read a bible in extracurricular activities or the like and anyone thinking that religion has to be completely removed from public life reflects the insecurity many religious people think atheists have, but usually don’t. As long as public religious behavior is not obnoxious and obstructing the basic freedom from religion that complements freedom of practice in the first amendment it is permissible. Religious people have no reason to be opposed to atheists’ activism of separating church and state, not only because by any stretch of theology church should be separate from state by their natures, but because by establishing religious neutrality of the government, all religions can flourish better in not being favored or disfavored by civil authorities.

A common claim is that by separating church and state, atheists want to put themselves in power. First off, that wouldn’t follow because we’d still remain a representative republic, where officials are voted in by majority, which means that atheism would have to become popular in the people’s minds. By no means is church/state separation trying to keep religious people out of government, as long as they maintain their beliefs privately and don’t try to foist them on the populace that doesn’t necessarily agree, nor should it be their business to legislate such things in the first place. Atheism is not favored by church and state separation anyway, primarily because atheism is neither a political ideology or a religion, so in a sense, atheism is simply given fair treatment only in that it has a position about religion that would be problematic in a system where theism in any form is favored. A blank wall, contrary to what many advocates of the prayer banner in Cranston West, does not advocate atheism anymore than a bald man’s head suggests he’s favoring anti-hair rights. When religion is privatized, religious people may still evangelize, but only within their own power, and not under the protection of the state in any sense. Christian prayers, along with any other divisive type of devotion, will not be allowed by the very principle that school is a place for secular education first and foremost. A moment of silence will suffice, and anyone thinking otherwise neglects the point I’ve visited already in this article on praying in public. If your God only hears you when you pray out loud in a group, then it’s a pretty pitiable deity for promoting conformity over individuals in their own walks.

People might question why atheists advocate something that isn’t explicitly stated in the Constitution. While the phrase “separation of church and state” isn’t in the constitution, neither is “minority protection”, “separation of powers” or other things we take for granted as implied, but not outright stated, by the principles set forth in the constitution. When it says “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof” we have two spheres of consideration. The first is the government’s relation to religion. This isn’t just a matter of the government not establishing a state religion, as many would say, but not favoring any religion at all. The government is inevitably full of religious people, yes, but the government itself is not founded on any explicitly religious ideas, contrary to popular myths. Laws against murder, theft and the like are not derived from the Ten Commandments, thankfully. This relates well to the second clause of free exercise, since if the Ten Commandments were applied as laws across the board, it would be illegal for non theistic religions to even be practiced, such as Buddhism or Jainism, which would directly contradict the free exercise clause that so many Christians throw around. So that whole line of argument is defeated on the grounds that you wouldn’t want other religions to not be practiced, since that would contradict the equality of that clause for all citizens, not just Christians. Yes, you have a freedom to practice your religion, but you have no reason to ask the government to stroke your proverbial ego. You have a demographic majority in this country; that should suffice. And whatever your practice of religion may be, it necessarily stops at government legislation and involvement in any form, for the same reason that the government doesn’t go to your churches and tell you what to preach. As much as many states still have discriminatory religious tests, which goes against article six of the constitution, the argument that the first amendment only applies to the federal government is directly contradicted by this “no religious test” article which applies to employees of the government at all levels implicitly.

People think atheists are being anti Christian in their advocacy of church and state separation, but this is incidental. If there were Muslims or Jews trying to enforce unconstitutional school prayers of their religion or use government money to aid their particular groups, then the ACLU and FFRF would be up in arms as well, though it’d be unlikely. It’s primarily Christians that have a complex about their established traditions being removed because people actually know the law and how it applies to the relation between religion and government as a whole. And when people’s religious freedoms are infringed upon, I also have a problem with that, such as the building of a mosque and community center in my home state being stopped on groundless claims by primarily Christian people. Many Christians don’t understand where their religious freedoms stop, thinking that any restriction on their religious practice in public is discriminatory, mostly because they buy into a myth that the founding fathers actually wanted religion to be the basis of government, which is patently false. Similar limitations apply to freedom of speech as freedom of religious practice; you cannot abuse what is partly a privilege along with being a right. You have all the freedom in the world to practice Christianity of various flavors, along with any other faith across the globe. But that stops when you are in primarily secular contexts and should be privatized, not completely suppressed as alarmists might hastily conclude. There is much more freedom in the vast sphere of public religious practice than the tiny amount of freedom you surrender in terms of being supported or endorsed by any government extension. Why people don’t see this is best attributed to the false sense of entitlement they get by being in the privileged majority. If you were in a position where you felt like you couldn’t even talk about your beliefs or disbelief in some alternate American religious culture, perhaps you might understand why atheists and Christians alike can agree that religion shouldn’t be endorsed in any sense by the government. When the government is neutral to religion, the behavior of religions can flourish in a public and private setting without feelings of trying to invade every aspect of life as some would have it in schools and government.

I admittedly already spoke about this in part in “WDAD About Religious Norms Part 2” but this extended take on questions theists and Christians would probably ask of me and other nonbelievers is important for many reasons I could linger on. Bottom line; no religious freedoms are being taken away by removing explicit religious displays and behavior from a particular area of life, such as with the case involving Jessica Ahlquist in Rhode Island. Certain Christian denominations were persecuted by other sects in America’s early past for not being Christian enough or not believing the right things. That’s why the founding fathers saw fit to keep it out of government, on the federal and state level, entirely. Perhaps we’ll always vote Christians in, but those Christians can divide their loyalty to their country and to God in separate but overlapping spheres. Pray in private, but not as a representative for people of faith and no faith alike. That way, your devotion is that much more sincere because you don’t feel any need to justify it to others. If the primary nature of religion is a communion between human individuals and the sacred, then you shouldn’t care whether the government gives you any spotlight about your fellowship with God. Keep church and state within their respective boundaries and they’ll both function that much better. You can vote your conscience as a Christian, but don’t vote as if Christianity has any special place in the government’s eyes, because even if it does, it shouldn’t. It’s not looking to please any humans, is it? Pleasing your God suffices. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

No Southern Hospitality For Atheists

http://www.bastropenterprise.com/features/x2132687894/Student-challenges-prayer-at-Bastrop-graduation
http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/hed7y/threatened_to_contact_aclu_for_prayer_at/
http://www.blaghag.com/2011/05/atheist-high-schooler-receives-death.html
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/05/standard_small_town_saga.php
http://friendlyatheist.com/2011/05/21/what-happened-at-damon-fowlers-graduation/

This topic jumped out at me due to my near addictive interest in issues of church and state. Just recently in Louisiana the graduation at the local high school in Bastrop, Louisiana proceeded with a student directly violating the First Amendment’s establishment clause; in a pretty duplicitous manner, might I add. This was a willful and unjustified protest against the changes the school put in place, responding to Damon Fowler, a fellow secularist, and his allegation that they were not only violating the Constitution, but Louisiana state law, which has a similar provision against laws that discriminated against or favored any religion. Technically atheism is not a religion, but one can instead claim that it was favoring Christianity, and since this is a state sponsored institution, a public high school, doing an invocation that favors a particular religion is unconstitutional. Here’s the first of two different videos involving willful defiance against the change in the program from a prayer to a moment of silence. The student in question, Laci Mattice, stated at the beginning of the ceremonies that she was originally going to lead an invocation, but that she was instead told to lead a moment of silence. I don’t see why leading a moment of silence is less important than leading a prayer. The worst part of this was her trying to weasel out of her official duties by disclaiming that before she “fulfilled [her] obligation” she wanted to thank God for helping her graduate; because she really needed to pray to be the salutatorian instead of actually studying. Afterwards, she tried to sound amicable to nonbelievers by asking that those who believed as she did bow their heads to pray. But she never temporarily suspended her duties with those disclaimers; it doesn’t work that way. As personal and individual as she tried to make it, she was sponsored by the school in that position and she had no right to do that prayer regardless of her personal beliefs or being offended by the replacing of the “traditional” invocation with a moment of silence. Pure and simple, she was not only in dereliction of her official duties, but she was spitting in the face of religious freedom. And don’t tell me that her letting all the Christians bow their heads was being charitable to non Christians. She wanted to shove this prayer down everyone’s throats in direct opposition to the school itself telling her that she could not do a prayer. And what does the school do? They sit by as the status quo is maintained even in spite of an affirmation to the contrary by the school authorities. There’s a time and place for being religious and thanking your creator for academic success, and it’s called the baccalaureate. Quite possibly, the first video might have been a baccalaureate, but the sources suggest this was related to, but not the same as, the graduation ceremony itself.

This video, however, seems to be the graduation ceremony, where the same student proceeds to go with a nearly identical process. She says she respects other people’s beliefs, but then proceeds to disrespect them by saying that her desire to thank Jesus trumps the rights of everyone to not hear it in a public context sponsored by the state. She asks her fellow students to join in, again trying to slip around the school sponsored prayer bit, but you can clearly hear the audience joining in, so she might as well have just announced to everyone, “Hey, we’re having a prayer, even though they told us we can’t legally do it. They can’t touch us, we’re the majority!” It’s a contemptible display of majority tyranny. Tennessee can be pretty bad about it in certain regions, but I can’t recall getting even a minute vibe similar to this travesty. And in both instances, they give a pittance of time for the moment of silence, maybe 15 seconds, while they get at least twice that length for their own public soapbox to condescendingly preach.

The student in question, Damon Fowler, was reported by his brother to have gotten death threats from some people. Couple this with the social ostracism from a class that’s practically the same size as mine in a relatively small area and it’s amazing he hasn’t been outright attacked. This whole incident was an unnecessary and unfounded vindication of a majority’s wants over a minority’s needs. Atheists don’t want to be treated like everyone else; they deserve and need to be treated like everyone else. For someone to ask their classmates, even nicely, to pray is to isolate non Christian students. But with the community at large cheering this girl on, it just reinforces this negative tradition that anyone not in the majority religion should sit by and let their supposed guarantee of freedom from state sponsored religion get trampled on.

Any Christian reader should not get the idea that I have a problem with students praying privately and reading their bible in non class contexts at school. My problem is with people being so proud of their own faith that once they’ve realized they are in a majority, they think they deserve special treatment. Even if they preface it by saying other people have their right to believe or not, when you use a position of authority like this to pray your specific prayer, you instate the exact opposite feeling which you were trying to inspire before. It only makes religious diversity seem all the less likely when you think being a majority religion or a religion of many founding fathers gives you carte blanche to speak openly about it with no fear of persecution. Not to mention it clashes with an admonition from Jesus himself in Matthew 6:5 that you should pray privately to God, so as not to seem like a hypocrite who wants to be seen by everyone as religious. Your outward behavior is not what God cares about, from what I understand; it’s your internal convictions. And aren’t we supposed to be in the last days where Christians are persecuted? Clearly these kids aren’t worried that Christians will be persecuted since they feel they can just pray a Christian prayer and no government will get on them. I only hope the ACLU and FFRF get on the school about this, though I’m not sure of the exact intervention they could do at this point. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

On the (Gated) Wall Between Church and State

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39740538/ns/politics-decision_2010/

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/10/19/odonnell-gets-coons-for-constitutional-law-101/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_exclusive/20101019/pl_yblog_exclusive/church-state-and-the-first-amendment-what-odonnell-needs-to-know

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/10/20/my-take-odonnells-and-americas-first-amendment-ignorance/

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20101021/ap_on_re_us/us_christian_flag_defenders

This story dragged me into speaking about it, however politically apathetic I am. Seriously, how many other candidates for office don’t know the basics of the Constitution, like the 1st Amendment? I don’t claim to be an expert myself, though I do have a copy. But doesn’t it seem out of character for someone who wants to represent the United States, and has even promised to follow the Constitution as a Senator, to not know the text and political thought concerning even the very 1st Amendment of that Constitution?

The only one so far seems to be Christine O’Donnell, who I spoke about only two weeks ago in a commentary on how her claim that Satanism and Witchcraft were the same reflects badly on the U.S. pagan population. She’s not making herself any more vote-worthy, though I can’t say I’d buy into a political system that has generated so many hypocrites and doesn’t even seem to be generally united under anything, not even the Constitution so many speak of as sacred scripture. But I shouldn’t blame those that misuse politics in my rejection of it as generally useful today. A Latin phrase I take to heart as much as possible is “abusus non tollit usum”. The basic translation is; “Just because something is misused doesn't mean it can't be used correctly,” This applies quite well to both the situation here with senatorial candidates who don’t seem to know much about the Constitution beyond what benefits them and a related story that has been in the news for a while now on a Christian flag being fought over as to its legality of being flown on public government property. With both of these events, there is an intersection of two contested areas; these being church/religion and state/politics.

First, we have Christine O’Donnell’s ignorance as to the proper way in which the more private religious sphere should interact with the more public political sphere. Thomas Jefferson, one of the originators of the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” has much to say on the subject. He wrote; “Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle,” which seems to suggest he believed that however genuine one’s devotion to a faith may be, it does not mean that they have a right to enforce that faith as something everyone else must follow and vice versa with the government in telling the governed how they should worship. Christine O’Donnell has personal issues with homosexuals, claiming they choose to be that way by social conditioning, opposes virtually all abortion and doesn’t see it as a violation of the Constitution to teach creationism in public schools. This exemplifies what I’ve spoken on as a persistent problem: candidates for public office don’t seem to have more than a passing knowledge of either religion or the Constitution’s stance on government sponsorship of it. This has been shown by people like Ron Ramsey and Lou Ann Zelenik saying Islam is either a cult or a political movement, not a religion, and Christine O’Donnell making an amateurish analysis of Satanism and Witchcraft, saying they’re essentially the same, without understanding it beyond what she thought was a date on a Satanic altar. If candidates had mistaken beliefs like this, but shared similar political positions to their constituency, I could forgive the masses for voting for them in spite of their willed ignorance. But I can’t imagine a sensible person voting for O’Donnell after finding out that she didn’t know the wording in the First Amendment that the government should not permit any sponsorship of religion of any kind in publicly funded areas. O’Donnell’s response to her opponent’s criticism was that teaching evolutionary theory in schools was violating that same principle that she apparently only knows enough to point fingers at the “secularists,” She confuses the scientific theory of evolution, separate from any particular religion, with secular humanism, recognized by the U.S. government as an official religion, which happen to believe in it. There are Christians that believe in evolutionary theory as well, so clearly it is held in common by both religions without it being a matter of either of their belief systems. It seems like Ms. O’Donnell feels threatened by evolution as it “forces its way into public schools” in her view. If she really wants to do something about Christianity’s supposed suppression, maybe she could advocate schools teaching about Christianity in history or as a literary tradition. It would be both beneficial to her campaign and would be quite legal on both counts.

Secondly, concerning the controversy surrounding a Christian flag, the solution seems quite simple, however much veterans are making this an issue not unlike the “Cordoba Mosque” in New York. However insulted you might feel that the government is telling you that it is not legal to raise a Christian flag on federally funded property, it doesn’t mean that they mean any disrespect towards you or Christianity. Selling the property for the flag hanging area to the veterans’ association would make it private property and fit for demonstration of any religious symbols. This misuse of the freedom to practice religion shouldn’t make one think that any demonstration of religious belief in public life is illegal. It’s just that when you start making your religious beliefs as they relate to public politics something people have to automatically respect, it’s gone too far. You have every right to believe as you will about the afterlife, deities or Deity, ethics and vote accordingly in elections, but only to the extent that you do not use that system to legislate those beliefs on others that don’t share them. I certainly don’t want veterans to feel like they can’t honor their fallen Christian allies, but there’s no reason to force the public to sponsor that when they don’t all share those beliefs about religion or patriotism. Here’s hoping this will blow over like the desert cross I spoke about a few months ago. Until next time, Namaste and aloha.

No True Tea Party

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_tea_party_concerns

With the Tea Party’s favorite day of the year for protests today, I’m reminded of the alleged racial slurs and even violence that may have been associated with Tea Party sympathizers. Admittedly, that poses a potential error of correlation versus causation (i.e. I may just be connecting Tea Party extremism I see with the violence even though it may have just been perpetrated by whack-jobs that have no life outside of saying how angry they are at big government) but onto more relevant consideration. The organizers are worried that the protests might show a bad image of the Tea Party. I find this funny since even without the alleged connections of violence against supporters of the recent healthcare reform to the Tea Party that I blogged on a few weeks ago the Tea Party still seems like disgruntled ill educated citizens that are frustrated at being a minority group. Though another article I’ll note (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/us/politics/15poll.html) suggests through a poll (though we know those aren’t always the best indicators of overall thought from my blog post on the Meaning(s) of Easter) that Tea Party members are actually relatively wealthy and educated. That doesn’t mean they’re not a minority, since the poll notes only 18% of the people polled identify as Tea Party affiliated.

Back to the Tea Party Day celebration, some of the more controversial speakers that were invited (like Mike Huckabee?) have now been politely declined, security has been enhanced and people were asked to bring cameras to catch interlopers in the act. Some have suggested that the protestors that drew attention at Tea Party protests were agents placed to make the Tea Party look bad. I can’t validate this one way or another, but if we’re talking about a relatively small group of citizens that are commonly white, Republican, over 45 and married, you can’t put it past them to feel defensive, however well educated and wealthy they might be. Put another way, imagine you put an otherwise mellow domestic housecat (say a Persian) in a cage for a week with minimum food and water and I guarantee you’ll find that pussy will be less than happy to see people when you set it free. Similarly, I imagine these people feel underrepresented, marginalized and more than a minority, if not a silent majority as one image I found while searching through Google suggested. In this way, the message is communicated quite differently. Instead of being a minority that’s oppressed, they’re just the majority that’s being silenced by a minority that holds more power. I’m not even going to get into potential conspiracy theories about the Jews in politics or the NWO (New World Order).

The thing I find most amusing about this is the allegations from Tea Party members that the people who use offensive language or in some cases, imagery such as President Obama depicted in the style of the Joker from The Dark Knight are not representative of true Tea Party members. This shows what is called a “No True Scotsman” fallacy. The gist of this problematic argument form is that it refuses to admit that its initial premise is wrong because of a counterexample; instead they modify their original position and suggest that “true” members of their group are not like the counterexample offered. In the case of Tea Party activists, they insist that people that use offensive language or imagery or extremist rhetoric are not associated with their group. Problem with this is that they would suggest that people only pay attention to their status quo and ignore what is a demonstrable problem in their ranks as a grassroots movement. If they have no structure to speak of in arranging and managing their members, then it’s no wonder people think of them as little more than a fringe group that poses little to no threat except their bomb threats or the suggestion of some states (Oklahoma in particular) to start state militias. Now a counterpoint would appear in the form of a Latin phrase abusus non tollit usum, translating roughly to “misuse does not remove use”. A sincerely progressive Tea Party member (if it exists, and it may) would argue that excessively emotionally charged speeches and rousing of the masses to change being the common mantra of even non extremist Tea Party members does not suggest that the Tea Party ideal is not something with merit. Historical comparisons to the original namesake of the present movement aside, conservative ideals are something I respect, along with liberal ideals, so even the Tea Party has merit in some sense. The difficulty comes in the form of how it presents itself. A group for the common people is one thing, but a group maintained by mob rule and pure majority dominance is only going to survive for as long as people remain uneducated and willing to be ignored or dismissed. And I sincerely doubt that’s going to continue to be the case for longer in either case. Until next time, Namaste and Aloha.